Rafael Ferrer was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and attended Syracuse University, where he began painting. He lived in New York and then returned to Puerto Rico in his twenties, and in 1966 moved to Philadelphia, where he taught at the Tyler School of Art. Within two years he burst onto the New York art scene by—without an invitation—dumping bushels of leaves into the stairwells at the Castelli Warehouse, where a landmark exhibition, 9 at Leo Castelli, was being held. As a native of the Caribbean, Ferrer was unaccustomed to trees’ shedding their leaves in autumn, and he wanted to reacquaint New Yorkers with this cyclical phenomenon that tends to be taken for granted by residents of the Northeast. His action attracted the attention of the art world, and he was invited to participate in the 1969 Whitney Museum exhibit, Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials. Ferrer installed large blocks of ice at the entrance to the museum—ephemeral versions of the Minimalist cube—suggesting the creation of the work of art and its inevitable dissolution. He was associated at the time with artists such as Robert Morris and Richard Serra, who emphasized the process of construction of the artwork and the properties of its materials rather than the object itself. In the 1970s, Ferrer turned to painting and sculpture, often with reference to his Caribbean heritage. In the next decade, he concentrated almost exclusively on easel painting, producing a body of work that stands as an homage to the people and places of the Caribbean at the same time that it reminds us of the intricate political and economic dynamics among the United States, Puerto Rico, and the other Caribbean islands. Ferrer has lived in Greenport, on the North Fork, since 1998.
[Jennifer Kruglinski]

Rafael Ferrer has long mined twentieth-century art for source material. In a project for a series of sculptures to be installed on a seaside esplanade in his native Puerto Rico, his inspiration included Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, and Juan Gris. Once his pantheon has been established, Ferrer assumes the role of graffiti artist-embellishing his works with encrypted symbols made elegant in cast bronze.